CVE-2024-42368: open-telemetry has an Observable Timing Discrepancy

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2024-08-13 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-208

Description

OpenTelemetry, also known as OTel, is a vendor-neutral open source Observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. The bearertokenauth extension's server authenticator performs a simple, non-constant time string comparison of the received & configured bearer tokens. This impacts anyone using the `bearertokenauth` server authenticator. Malicious clients with network access to the collector may perform a timing attack against a collector with this authenticator to guess the configured token, by iteratively sending tokens and comparing the response time. This would allow an attacker to introduce fabricated or bad data into the collector's telemetry pipeline. The observable timing vulnerability was fixed by using constant-time comparison in 0.107.0

Affected products

open-telemetry opentelemetry-collector-contrib: from 0.80.0 before 0.107.0 — fixed in 0.107.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: open-telemetry opentelemetry-collector-contrib 0.107.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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